


The Cost of Justice

by a17tabris



Category: DCU, Death Note
Genre: Crossover, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-20
Updated: 2010-01-20
Packaged: 2017-10-06 12:07:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/53491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a17tabris/pseuds/a17tabris
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What do you do when you've killed your lover's mentor?</p><p>Written in response to a challenge to write fic for a crazy crossover pairing whose virtues I'd been espousing nonstop to my friends.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Cost of Justice

**Author's Note:**

> This was one of the first pieces of fanfiction I ever posted on the internet, although far from the first I wrote. For that, it's not quite so bad as it might be. I make no claims beyond that for its merit.

"I'm sorry." It wasn't enough, he knew, to make up for killing the man Tim had respected more than anyone else in the world, whose principle had been that even the bad guys deserved better than to be killed, but right now it was all Light could manage. It was most upsetting of all to recognize that he'd known when he killed the detective that the boy running around behind him had been his own lover, but that it hadn't made a difference.

The Batman was too much of an idealist to have any real effect on crime throughout the world. For one thing, he had been spending too much of his time lately hunting Kira. It had all been useless, of course. A notebook that kills people isn't something that would come to the mind of any sane detective, and even one insane enough to dress up as a marsupial and jump out of the night at criminals didn't have the the uncreative ingenuity needed to fix on a pen as a murder weapon.

But he had been an annoyance. Although Light was confident in his own ability to resist the charms of a night terror, the masked menace had come dangerously close in his random interrogations to picking up the second and third Kiras. And Misa and Mikami weren't like him. Even though they had idolized the idealized Kira, they couldn't put up with his presence in reality. When Kira was around them, he had to put on his domestic face— his Light mask. Even Mikami, the supposed fanatic of justice, wasn't psychologically equipped to deal with it when it came from anything other than his own painful past. They just weren't strong enough to deal with a lunatic convinced that he could singlehandedly eliminate crime.

Tim was. Of course, it was obvious in retrospect that Light wasn't the first one he'd met. Would Tim have been ready, if he'd met Kira first, to have joined his side to the extent that he'd been on Wayne's? It didn't seem likely. More probably, it was his familiarity with the billionaire that had prepared him to love Light. There just wasn't anyone in the world, with the exception of Light himself, who was able in his natural state to face Kira head on. What luck that he had met the one boy who'd had the best training possible.

But Wayne's problem had always been that he wasn't willing to go far enough. Light had heard it claimed that if the Batman had been able to work faster, to fully do what he already had been doing, that the world would be free of crime; that was bullshit. Bruce Wayne was too proud of what he was before becoming justice to really embody the principle. When he became Batman, he did so half in the memory of his parents– and why hadn't it been more obvious that the one man with enough money to build that stuff and a personal investment in the problem had been the one?– and half out of a hubristic love of the blacked-out spotlight that they put up in the sky for him. It was all personal for him, just like with Mikami. That kind of a love for justice could only lead to the kind of showy heroism in which Wayne had spent his life. It could never lead you to lose your soul for the good of the world, the way Light was doing.

And Tim was perhaps more ready to do that that Wayne had ever been. He didn't wait until his father had been murdered to start his fight against crime. He recognized the need for justice, and so he had sought out the single man most obviously making it happen. He wouldn't take no for an answer: even without any reason in his own life demanding that he take a stand, he insisted on going out and making the world a better place. Even when his father had been killed by that bastard with the boomerang– and it was Light's sincerest wish that that man had lived to suffer the kind of death he deserved at the hands of Kira– Tim hadn't turned his fight against crime into the kind of vendetta it was for his master.

Yes, Tim might have been able to work with Light on this project. It may have been a miscalculation to use his honesty against his mentor. His temperament was such that he would only have been able to work with Kira as Kira, and– now that Kira was his enemy– revealing that Light and Kira were the same would only cheapen both in his eyes. On the other hand, the sentimentalist in Light was happy to spare Tim any knowing involvement in the enterprise, at least until it was over. The image of Tim as a mad martyr for the cause of justice just made what little soul Light had left hurt.

Tim as a tortured Horatian story-bearer worked much better. He made a mental note to include Tim on the very select group of people who both deserved and could handle the truth: those who had sufficient involvement in the whole Kira thing to be worthy of knowing exactly who was behind it and sufficient respect for the improved world Kira had begotten not to speak the truth to anyone else. The list was very short: so far it included Tim and Wilson, the latter more as an explanation for why he would have to kill a pop idol and an attorney than out of any real worthiness of character. Those two, and any others who showed themselves deserving in what time Light had left before his soul was gone to the point of his necessary failure, would receive letters explaining that the mild-mannered graduate student they had [been sleeping with/killed people for] was actually the notorious killer Kira about whom they had heard so much. There would be in each a specialized section explaining the recipient's own role in the matter: Deathstroke would have to be told why Misa and Mikami had to die, and Tim– it was only right, although imagining his face upon reading it was not a pleasant experience, and Light hoped that Tim would interpret the wince he gave as an indication of sympathy rather than the half-guilt it was– would have to learn that he had himself unwittingly betrayed the Batman to his death.

It had hurt the part of Light that was still a man, instead of a god or death itself or whatever it was he was becoming, to ask the question. It had been a long time since anything had even reached that part of him, and he got the feeling that, with the possible exception of his own death, nothing else ever would. But when Tim had taken him out for a nice dinner, and the deep dark secret that he'd had to reveal afterwards was "I'm Robin"? Light couldn't pass up an opportunity like that. He'd been trying for months edging on years to find out the identity of the man in the batsuit, and if the only way was to get the answer from the young man he loved as much as he loved anyone, so be it.

"Who's the Batman?" he'd asked, and Tim, who'd trusted him enough to reveal his own bespandexed adventures, hadn't wasted a second in telling him the truth. Bruce Wayne. It really should have been obvious, but even though he'd considered the option it would have been a nightmare if Kira had killed a mere billionaire with no other reason. The new world might have become some kind of horrid Marxist workers' utopia as a result of that one action. It was hard trying to revolutionize the world without the ability to articulate what you were doing. But when the Batman dropped dead and they found Wayne inside, it sent a message. It said that neither a mask nor money could save you from the wrath of the new world's God.

Once he'd gotten the information from Tim, doing it had been easy. He'd waited a few weeks, of course, so as not to arouse Tim's suspicions. Wayne had died in the batsuit, in broad daylight, in the center of Gotham, with a note in his hand declaring his death to be the work of Kira. The best part was that since nobody was clear on whether Kira needed names to kill, it didn't occur to anyone that Kira must have known the Batman's alter ego. Tim, naturally, had come straight to Light. To his credit, he didn't consider for a second that he might pick up where Wayne had left off. Tim didn't indulge himself in that kind of grief, the kind of lifelong angry mourning that had lead the detective to his necessary death. All he wanted was the company and reassurance of the one person left in the world that he loved. And that, Light could provide. "Don't worry," he'd say, "I'll never let Kira kill you." And Tim wouldn't know just how certain he could be.

Without the Batman around, the world would be all in all a safer place. He may have taken crime off of the streets, but he'd just forced it into the heads of new, better, criminals. Without the Batman around, there never would have been a Joker, a Penguin, a Hush: elementary medical science said that when you kill off only the weak bacteria you breed new, more vicious strains. The same was true of criminals. If you didn't go directly after the top, you were strengthening crime, not fighting it. With Batman gone, and hence with the JLA neutered– if the richest and most feared of them wasn't safe, the others would hide like ostriches– the superhero model of justice was dead. That left Kira as the only true justice. Kira would work. Light had always known that the superheroes would eventually have to go if justice was going to prevail. It was a shame that those closest to realizing justice ended up as its penultimate enemies, but that was the way things worked. There was no time to worry about that, not when Kira himself would eventually have to disappear. When the world was just enough that Kira himself was an impediment to justice, that would be a world worth living in. But now to the young man in tights weeping into his chest. "I'm sorry. Things will get better, Tim. I promise." And they would.


End file.
